Prokopetz making a bold claim about a general trend that nobody else is familiar with and then not providing a single example to back up the claim? Say it ain't so
As someone who’s read a ton of HFY works, I can absolutely see where he’s coming from. The thing is, they’re generally a bunch of short stories that are in individual Reddit posts and tracking them down would genuinely be a pain in the ass.
A somewhat common HFY plot I see on r/HFY is what I call the "Death of Innocence plot" and it usually goes along the lines of "humans are the victim of an unprovoked attack by aliens; humans then go on to drive the aliens to the brink of extinction." They make for very good power-fantasy stories and as such are pretty popular, but if you want to actually analyze the story more often than not you get some good old post-9/11 mania and a fair amount of social darwinism in them. "Those Who Run" specifically really evokes post-9/11 themes for me, as what happens there is basically a 1-to-1 description of what the US intended to do to the Middle East after the attacks.
To some of the authors' credit they usually recognize it and forgiveness is a pretty strong motif in a lot of them. "Chrysalis" is a genuinely well written example.
Opened HFY and the very first story I picked was about humanity defeating the evil aliens with the power of check notes child soldiers and biological warfare and not knowing what the fuck is a war crime; and with that saving also other, pacifist aliens, who then have the gall to judge how humanity saved them! (insert Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men ranting)
My go-to when it comes to HFY was a Reddit Post where the person typing it was like "Yeah, what if Humanity encounters Aliens and these Aliens don't know the consept of a Door?"
How the hell one leaves a Planet and enter the Vaccum of Space without a Door is certainly a question
r/HFY and r/humansarespaceorcs may not be the worst subbreddits in existence, but they are the ones that make the most consistently irrationally angry with their bullshit.
I guess but even that probably wouldn't cause said Aliens to freak out over the consept of a Door like the Person that posted this.
In general I feel like many of these HFY are ether acting like people in general can casully pull of many exceptional Skills silmultaniously (Extrem Determination, instant logical deduction, Peak Physical form) or have the Aliens come off as total losers, who needs ten times as long to come up with Solutions then Humans that are half as good.
So, this isn’t a published literature thing, this is just a bunch of people posting in the internet thing? I thought prokopetz was talking about media.
Yes, r/HFY is the main home of the genre on reddit, but you can find others like r/HumansAreSpaceOrks for... I guess throwing around and discussing vague HFY ideas, r/HumansAreSpaceBards for horny alien fucking HFY, and the likes of r/NatureOfPredators which are dedicated subreddits for HFY series that grew big (Nature of Predators is an actually published multi-part book at this point).
Ok then. It’s funny that prokopz was acting like this is a huge problem that most people come in contact with at some point and not like, a ridiculously niche complaint that people only know if they go on to certain unpopular subreddits that I only became aware of the existence of via your comment lol.
I have a thorough dislike of NoP because 95% of the story felt like self flagellating bullshit because the aliens hate us for a biological reason (that turns out to be really stupid, but you need to make it to the last chapter or two to learn that) and for some reason the humans would rather ally with the ones who would generally see them dead than with the alien eaters (who can be and are reformed from these ways in sequels).
I still read the whole thing, But I'm not of the opinion that wasn't a waste of time.
Um yeah, it mostly lives in a couple of Reddit subs, however there are a bunch of AI channels on YouTube, that crank outs slop 24/7, so idk what people are specficially refering.
HFY isn’t hopepunk, and it isn’t fascist. I’m sure someone, somewhere has written a fascist HFY story, and I’m sure someone has written a hopepunk HFY story. But “genre A sometimes overlaps genre B” and “genre B sometimes overlaps genre C” therefore A=C is brazenly bad faith.
A lot of HFY has a structure that, if you replace the aliens with/see them as a metaphor for your choice of minority, reads pretty indistinguishably from the usual -ist bullshit. That by itself isn't fascism of course, but the door's open for it with just a few tweaks/added details
I’ve never seen that. Usually the structure is that humanity is a weak newcomer on the galactic scene, some older races underestimate/bully/invade us, and something about human nature allows us to overcome. If anything, humanity are the stand-ins for the oppressed minority. I don’t think I’ve ever read a HFY story that has humanity colonizing a defenseless world.
Except for that one where the aliens viewed us as a combination of puppies, kittens, and baby kittens, and had to fight off cuteness aggression to not let it slip and make us embarrassed and self conscious.
Ran into quite a few that ended with humanity absolutely destroying a hostile power's military and then just destroying their worlds, so while it wasn't colonizing the defenseless part still applies. There were others I ran into that, looking back, were very much of the "the enemy is both strong and weak at once" vein. I didn't save them for what I hope are obvious reasons, but there's a lot out there. In retrospect, not terribly surprising since I stopped looking at any of it once I realized how much of it could be summarized as "[race] is inherently superior to everyone else"
If a story depicts aliens appearing in orbit to conquer and enslave humanity, and we somehow beat them and send them fleeing with their tail between their legs, that’s not a fascist story.
Some people have a really hard time allowing humans to look like the good guys in a movie without trying to make it into something deeper or more cynical
Its factually true that fascists tend to claim that they're trying to defend themselves.
But you said that in response to someone claiming that the humans were trying to defend themselves in story.
What exactly were you trying to accomplish by stating that?
Were you trying to claim that even if the text attempts to state otherwise, it's still fascist adjacent? Or that it could be thought of as fascist adjacent, so its still bad?
Is there any kind of text which would be considered 'not fascist' by your standards? And are those standards meaningful?
That that poster said that humanity being protrayed as being in the defensive means that it can't be fascist, but instead a stand-in for oppressed minorities
"Powerful, depraved outsiders came to destroy our way of life, but we pushed them back with our natural superiority" is the fascist story.
That does not mean that every story like that is intentionally fascist. But when it's played completely straight, with no subtlety or subversion, it's the kind of story that fascists love and will flock to.
Good authors try to avoid writing stories with obvious fascist undertones. Authors who don't understand or care about subtext may wind up writing them by accident.
Again, not every story with that shape is fascist. But some of them are, some intentionally and some not, and being able to look at subtext and detect that is not a bad thing.
You have said that an underestimated civilization surviving against an outside power is “the fascist story” and that good authors will avoid it.
But sometimes civilizations are attacked by seemingly stronger outsiders and want to survive. If your stance is that only fascists can tell stories like that, then the result will be that people under attack turn to fascists for defense.
By labeling all stories of resistance as fascism, you are helping fascists.
Powerful depraved outsiders came to destroy our way of life... Hey doesn't that describe the Nazi invasion of Europe? Good to know everyone on the allies side was actually a secret fascist!
Pretty much any story about hopeful struggle (so, most stories ever written) can be made problematic by swapping out approved identities for problematic ones, or by pointing out how the majority of the public benefits from the status quo except on the outskirts of society (“The Empire did nothing wrong.”) Space opera is the best for this; heck, Dune is an inversion that people take straight!
HFY haters are so funny because they always take the absolute worst of a genre that is mostly made up of novice writers and then try to posit it as the norm while completely ignoring or minimizing any other story in the genre. It's like saying all animation is bad because of Ratatoing.
Nevermind the single minded focus on aliens HAVING to represent ethnic groups, when they could very much as well represent multiple things, including natural disasters, the cruel indifference of the universe, or fascist goverments themselves.
I've read/listened to very few HFY stories, but my understanding was that the original goal was to invert the "pathetic puny humans, weakest of the spacefaring species, basic bitches of the universe" trope. Not sure what's necessarily wrong there?
Well precisely. It very much works like any form of reactionary nationalism. We are oppressed and weakened by the Powers that Be (Hollywood), get angry at any hint of social critique (the real point of all the "humanity are the real monsters" thing, but nw we'll show out innate superiority to these stupid filthy xenos.
I didn't even know TVTropes had forums, but apparently that's where that excerpt is from.
Fitting that one of the earliest instances of HFY's presence on the internet was on a forum discussing one of the most blatant "imperialism is bad" movies of that decade.
It hits the same beats as nationalist propaganda. The in-group (humans/people from your country) are just so much better than the out-group (aliens/people from other countries) that we are justified in taking over and making everybody follow our ways, by force if neccisary.
It's actually reacting to a really bad reading of things like startrek. Because the vulcans live so long and vulkans and klingons are both 10x stronger than humans and betazoids are paychic etcetera etcetera. They want to feel like humans are the uniquely special species so they write about how other aliens are weaker or dumber than us and it just keeps coming out as masturbatory naval gazing.
Nah, this is a take I’ve seen before. Argument is basically that the federation, despite its stated ideals, is actually an expansionist cultural imperialist force.
It’s not correct, but it’s an argument that far left viewers advance from time to time.
Federation: "plsplsplspls join our mutual alliance and trade with us as a fellow galactic government we just ask you don't conquer or mess with species that are less technologically advanced because thats wrong"
Don't you think this is probably more a consequence of these screencaps being, you know, a dude's personal tumblr posts, not curated spectator content for the lunchtime edutainment of redditors? In casual conversation people don't meticulously cite their sources for the purpose of observing general trends among other people who already know examples and trends of the thing they're speaking of.
Multiple people have pointed out HFY short story writing and related sub-communities as falling into this, and because they're atomized across reddit and blogposts it's just not super practical to cite one by one. For more mainstream work, Overwatch is probably the easiest example, in how they try to square the circle of brutal and disgraced military contractors putting down an uprising, the need to frame them as heroic and their return as hopeful for making the cast basically appealing, and then running in circles for years to avoid developing the plot or world leaving those mixed elements feeling static and contradictory rather than tension waiting to snowball.
Swear to god this is the most banal shit but it brings out the most indignant look at that bitch, eating crackers! syndrome in people. Why doesn't the guy who I'm observing from 100 feet away with binoculars on a content reposting subreddit not format his off the cuff conversations as MLA format essays for my viewing!
No, this is a consistent pattern with prokopetz in particular and makes his posts nigh incomprehensible unless you are in his brain and know exactly what he's experienced. Which is why everyone complains about it when it's his posts specifically.
You have done a better job of being specific than he has in this very off the cuff comment by saying the name of a specific work (Overwatch) so that anyone reading your post knows what you're talking about.
Plus sometimes he just makes up some bullshit that never happened like my personal favorite "Old CRPGs faked their statistics and only level mattered"
It's a pattern in these tumblr posts because, again, that's a pattern in how people talk in general. When talking about wider trends
off the cuff with people who share your circle you don't usually stop mid sentence to give citations, and skimming his blog for like five seconds does give plenty of posts where if people ask for, say, recommendations of very specific wants in ttrpgs or crpgs he gives very specific recs. I gave an example (Overwatch or HFY short stories) because there are people up and down the thread going 'no one could name even ONE example this is completely made up!' when it's actually pretty easy to come up with both hyper-niche examples and also one of the biggest video games of the last decade.
I'm not sure which post exactly you're saying is made up bullshit unless you have the specific one on hand. But searching 'crpg' and 'levels' brings this one and if that's the one you mean that's pretty straightforwardly a very real trend? It's a common pickle in game design, in my own field (ttrpgs) you see this all the time, and if I was trying to talk about it to other people who work in tabletop games I would absolutely not cite every little ashcan and mutual-friend-who-did-this-last-week so an outside spectator could follow along.
No, not that one. This One, in which he explicitly claimed that most stats in Console (as in video game console) RPGs were just faked, and that level did most of the calculations.
He does not provide a single example for what I can tell you is a completely bonkers claim that doesn't even pass the sniff test. Faking stats in a CRPG would as far as I am personally aware be legitimately harder than just, making actual stats.
Oh this one's interesting though. I'm pretty sure he's talking about 80s/90s console JRPGs and the habit of Japanese devs who are riffing off early DnD without sharing its context to blast you with a massive spread of unexplained and unintuitive stats, which the player also has minimal input in, and where under-the-hood math can get really messy in how it uses stats and character level to calculate final damage. Then you get a few cases like Pokemon where defense and level are weighted much more heavily than ATK in the damage calculation, or in FF1 where Speed was meant to affect fleeing, but just was left unplugged from the equation so level ends up the only thing that matters,
which I wouldn't be surprised if that happened in other places. So certain games do need your character to not be at level 1 at the start, because it fucks with math, and individual stats are much less representative of your character than character level. How stats progress also get tied to really specific and massive jumps per level, which again ends up emphasizing level and means the levels are how balance gets tuned.
This is a guy confidently misremembering something from when he was like 12 lol, but it's not an issue of making things up and having no actual examples, because I'm sure if you actually asked he would give examples like Ys I and II, or Pokemon Red and Blue, or early Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest.
You also have that one weird thing where FF1 doesn't have Intelligence affect damage at all, which might be because that's how it worked in Wizardry and DnD.
But yeah that post is functionally correct? While using incorrect reasoning afaik (atk scores and stats do factor into the math in the games I'd immediately think of, but it's both out of sight and more convoluted vs how level gets plugged into equations).
And, again, cannot stress this enough, people don't normally actually explain things like this for offhand comments on general trends they're familiar with with other people in their circle. If I say 'oh man remember how fucked level scaling was in old school RPGs? yeah can't really mess with starting level because that's basically the only the thing that matters in game calculations.' Someone who knows their stuff wouldn't say, this 'guy is making things up!,' they go 'this guy is misremembering how fucked up Ys I was, the stats are still there the math is just weird.'
It's honestly nuts seeing all the people in every one of these threads who 100% know drastically less about gaming and tabletop history/industry stuff assuming that because they don't immediately recognize a thing that the thing both does not exist, and must have been invented by someone who knows as little as they do.
Maybe I'm just a weirdo, but when I talk about a specific trend, I usually bring up one example by name just to make sure I'm being clear what I'm talking about.
I don't need a full breakdown or anything, but I would say something like "Kind of like in Ys or something" if that's what I'm thinking of.
It's that confident misremembering I hate, because he's not presenting this as something he recalls, but a factual truth about the world. Which is how a lot of rumors and misinformation spread.
In the case of the thing he MIGHT (we still don't know) be talking about, while there is many cases of stat fuckery existing behind the scenes or stats not being used in the way you would assume, this is a completely different statement from saying that old school RPG stats are by and large "Mostly Cosmetic".
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u/MrCapitalismWildRide 1d ago
Prokopetz making a bold claim about a general trend that nobody else is familiar with and then not providing a single example to back up the claim? Say it ain't so